Cornwall Park, Greenlane West, Auckland
Type of Course – Three laps
Shoes Required – Road or trail
Things to know
Toilets are in the Pohutukawa Dr car park. There is ample free parking. There is space for motorhome parking.
The course is not permanently marked.
Forgotten your barcode? Email the RD to see if they can print off for you.
There are no showers nearby.
There is minimal signage in this park, head to the band rotunda for parkrun.
Cafe: Cornwall Park Café.
Location of start:
The event starts at the Band Rotunda (near the café).
Getting there by public transport
Please check Auckland Transport’s Journey Planner.
Stop 7612 at Great South Rd/Greenlane, Opp 205 Great South Rd, is the closest to the Main Gates of Cornwall Park and is a 20 minute walk to parkrun.
The 70 service from Symonds St leaves for this stop every 15 minutes.
Getting there on foot
There are three entrances from Campbell Rd, one at the top of Onehunga Mall going in at Grand Drive and another near Rawhiti Rd entering in at Bollard Ave. There is no vehicle access here.
There is also a footpath entrance opposite Horotutu Rd. There is another footpath entrance at the junction of Maungakiekie Ave (off Greenlane Rd) and Atarangi Rd, which is the closest entrance to the Band Rotunda.
Getting there by road
Main entrance is on Greenlane West Rd, at the traffic lights with Puriri Rd (which is very close proximity to the ASB Showgrounds). Turn into Cornwall Park onto Pohutukawa Dr.
From Manukau Rd there are two entrances, one near the Stardome Observatory in One Tree Hill and the other at Campbell Cres which leads into Puriri Rd and straight on to the Main Gate of Cornwall Park. Greenlane Rd is also accessible from the motorway, exit 433.
Stats
First run: July 28, 2012
Inaugural attendance: 35
Record attendance: 420 (01/02/2020)
Course records
Women: Becky Wade 17:44 (02/03/2013)
Men: Jonathan Jackson 15:49 (10/12/2016)
The store behind Cornwall Park parkrun…
Caitlin Barton, event director
I’ve been involved right from the start because mum and dad were country managers (Noel and Lian de Charmoy stepped down in November 2019).
Cornwall Park wasn’t the first to start but it was the one my parents got going.
We opened a couple of months after Lower Hutt, we would have opened before them but because we’re in a private park we had to make the park trust comfortable with what we were going to do.
They’d never had an event like this before and they’re very strict about numbers.
At our first run we had 35 runners, which isn’t a lot but enough to be scary – that 35 people had heard about it and they wren’t all family or friends. There were people we didn’t know.
Because my parents are friends with [parkrun founder] Paul Sinton-Hewitt it’s one parkrun where he organised the course before it went live.
They went to Cornwall Park multiple times, because parkrun has criteria for courses it was interesting to do it with the head honcho.
We didn’t really have to think about it because he was directing the course in a very natural manner.
Since then it’s been changed.
We’ve grown from strength from strength. We always knew numbers would grow to a decent size but it’s happened in parkrun’s traditional sense, slow growth over the years.
That’s how Paul told us to do it throughout the whole of New Zealand.
The café wasn’t there when we started. We used to go to oe down the road but after a while there were people standing outside as it had got so busy.
The park built a new café but it is right where we used to start the run. We turned up one Saturday to find the start line was a building site. It was three weeks out from opening when it burned to the ground. We arrived the the fire brigade were putting it out.
Cornwall Park is a beautiful private park, unique in Auckland. We run in such a small part of it. There’s One Tree Hill where you can get a view of all of Auckland, multiple cafes and so many different elements to the park.
When we started Cornwall parkrun we had an expectation of how it would grow because of knowing Paul and seeing how it had grown in the UK and South Africa.
Being a part of it has been much more amazing than what we thought it could be in the beginning.
I love the community that’s evolved over the years.
While in Auckland…
Explore Cornwall Park
Stardome Observatory Planetarium
Parnell Rose Gardens
La Cigale French Market
Kelly Tarlton’s Sealife Centre